Gina Rodriguez has been open about having anxiety, and with the final season of Jane the Virgin wrapping up this summer, Gina got candid about how she had to stop filming the show for her mental health.
During a discussion on mental health at The Kennedy Forum with NBC’s Kate Snow, Gina said she can typically work through her anxiety and keep acting but wasn’t able to this season. She explained:
“There was a point where I couldn’t…push through every single time anymore, and I’m one of those human beings…where they’re just like, I’ll handle it later. I’ll deal with it later. I’ll figure it out later. I just have to do this now. All the while you’re dealing with your silent little dragon in your head. And it came to a point, and this last season was the first season where I had to stop production. I had a really tumultuous season, and I was unafraid for the first time to be like, ‘I can’t.’”
After hearing Kate’s husband, Chris Bro, open up about depression and experiencing suicidal thoughts, Gina explained that she can relate.
Gina said she remembers having depression starting at age 16 and that it could be linked to her Hashimoto’s disease, which is an autoimmune thyroid disorder.
Thankfully, Gina said that once she started talking to other people about her mental health, “it just opened up a pathway that allowed me to talk about it freely, to seek help, to be unafraid.”
Later, she explained that she wants to continue talking about mental health awareness because so many people look up to her. She said, “It has to be a part of the conversations I have with these young girls. I can’t just tell them to go out and make their dreams come true and then to ignore everything else.”
